Dispense meaty slop.
4. Throw Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall off kitchen counter with one hand, while using other hand to carefully place two pink pills inside one dish of meaty slop. If possible, try to insert pills into meaty chunks themselves, rather than just into jelly. While doing this, try not to dwell overly on substance concerned. Think of it this way: yes, it smells, but if you really thought about an egg or some milk, you probably wouldn’t want to go near that either.
5. Wash hands, thoroughly.
6. Dive across kitchen, just in time to remove face of Intellectually Challenged Cat Resembling TV Food Enthusiast Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from pilled dish of meaty slop.
7. While looking the other way and pretending to be occupied, quickly swoop down and pick up Intellectually Challenged Fluffy Cat Resembling Rock Musician Pete Townshend.

I padded carefully towards him but something looked a bit odd about Pablo. The Panic Mouse was supposed to make cats thinner, but if I wasn’t mistaken, Winter Pablo looked even larger than usual. Lying upside down, he was a veritable puddle of cat, spilling across the floor. For all his intermittent bulk, Pablo had always had a pointy sort of face, compared by many to that of the celebrity chef and smallholder Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but now his jowls looked hideously stretched, his expression blank and moonlike. As he spotted me at the periphery of his vision, I saw none of the usual eagerness or nerves in his countenance, just something dopey and dazed.
There’s a familiar moment when you taste some crisps you’ve picked out of a bowl at a party that you thought were one flavour, but are actually another flavour, and momentarily baulk at them.

For people doing this home alone, give yourself about half an hour, maybe in two 15-minute bursts. I’m giving my class 20 minutes because I have put them into groups of four, so it’s easier for them.
Saudi Arabian Minister Visits Britain
Set up: The Queen rolled out the red carpet
Punchline ..................................................
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
(Who was in the studio when this joke was done.)
Set up: One female journalist visited Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and felt sick when he presented her with an entire tongue, curled round fatly in the shape of a question mark
Punchline ..................................................
David Beckham Has Had Corn Rows Platted Into His Hair
Set up: After his visit to the hairdresser he said that his head ‘hurt for a while’
Punchline ..................................................

…

Saudi Arabian Minister Visits Britain
The Queen rolled out the red carpet...
Class Answers:xvii
...but he decided to buy a Persian rug instead.
...Prince Philip rolled out after.
...though next time she’s going for wood flooring.
...whilst round the back Prince Harry rolled up a spliff.
Broadcast punchline:
The Saudi Arabian minister said I could have got that for you half price.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
One female journalist visited Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and felt sick when he presented her with an ‘entire tongue, curled round fatly in the shape of a question mark’
Class Answers:xviii
...Not as sick as when he invited her to taste his semi-colon.
...Imagine where the exclamation mark came from.
...She had to be carted away in an ambulance when he showed her his penis.
...She was already full up with his Cumberland sausage.
...But he knew the answer would be a smack in the chops.

We have seen how it inflicts prolonged suffering on sows who spend most of their lives in crates that are too narrow for them to turn around in; on caged hens; on chickens kept in unnaturally large flocks, bred to grow too fast, and transported and killed in appalling conditions; on dairy cows who are regularly made pregnant and separated from their calves; and on beef cattle kept in bare dirt feedlots. Though we like and respect Jake and Lee and take into account the time and economic pressures on families with children, we think that buying factory-farm products is not the right thing to do.
You don't have to be a vegetarian to reach this conclusion. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the author of The River Cottage Meat Booka large, glossy book devoted to the cooking and eating of meat. Yet he writes: "The vast majority of our food animals are now raised under methods that are systematically abusive. For them, discomfort is the norm, pain is routine, growth is abnormal, and diet is unnatural. Disease is widespread and stress is almost constant."' Fearnley-Whittingstall lives in England, where laws protecting animals are much stricter than in the United States.

…

Nutritionists agree that most people in developed countries eat far more animal products than they need, and more than is good for their health. Spending the same amount of money and buying fewer animal products would therefore be a good thing, especially if those animal products came from animals free to walk around outside, which would make the meat less fatty, and if the reduced consumption in animal products were offset by increased consumption of fruit and vegetables. That is the recommendation of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and few people are more devoted to food than he is.
For perhaps a billion of the world's poorest people, hunger and malnutrition are still a problem. But factory farming isn't going to solve that problem, for in developing countries the industry caters to the growing urban middle class, not the poor, who cannot afford to buy its products. In developing countries, factory farming products are chosen for their taste and status, not for the consumer's good health.

With the windfall on my hands, I could make some recipes that, because of frugality, I had never dared.
I sliced off the breast meat from a few of the ducks. Following the recipe in Charcuterie, I re-created a gamey but delicious duck prosciutto I had had in France. To make it, I simply rubbed the breasts with salt, added a coating of pepper, and stowed them in the fridge for a few weeks. The geese I put in the freezer to make goose sausages at a later date.
Chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the author of The River Cottage Meat Book, would be my guiding light. He inspired me, going on in his British way about duck confit: “Having a jar just sitting in the larder, bursting with savory potential, makes me salivate every time I see it.”
A confit is meat preserved by storing it in a thick layer of rendered fat. First I had to render the fat. So the next day—after the usual twenty-four hours of rest for the meat—I turned the oven on low.

…

After a grueling day of salami stuffing and pancetta rolling, I peered into the fridge and muttered, OK, OK, what is this? From behind a jar of sauerkraut and a half-empty container of stewed plums I pulled out the intestine-filled bag. It visibly quivered. I remembered my indignation, my disgust, at Sheila’s waste. Suddenly, it seemed quite reasonable. Ugh, just throw that shit away! But no, between Fergus Henderson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I could find recipes for this bag of offal.
Which smelled awful, by the way. I sloshed the bag onto the counter and untied the handles. Inside, cradled by white plastic, lay a liver the size of a placenta. It was a strange red color, almost blue. Next to it sat, rather perkily, a greenish thing that I had to assume was the stomach. I prodded it with my finger, and it yielded only slightly.

‘These pomo eaters have decided to walk on bare feet because they have decided to eat their own shoes,’ the provost of the Zaria College of Leather Technology was reported as saying.22
Which parts of a carcase are edible, or not, depends on social factors: how rich people are, what alternatives are available, and nowadays, what advertisers, health geeks and celebrity chefs happen to be propagating. In 1986 British people ate 1.1 kilos of offal per year out of 54 kilos of meat. In 2008 they consumed even more meat – 58 kilos – but a pathetic 250 grams of offal. Probably most offal eaters are now over the age of 60.23 However chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are now propagating the virtues of ‘the fifth quarter’, so we may see the decline in offal consumption reversed.
In the days when there were still horse-drawn rag and bone men providing a door-to-door recycling service, my mother used to boil up beef or chicken bones and scraps for stock which became the foundation for a quality of soup that many people under the age of 40 have never tasted.

…

If Lord Haskins’ figures are correct we are importing roughly the same quantity of pork and bacon as we could supply from post-farmgate food waste.
However, this is not such an ill wind. Over the last few years there has also been a discernible rise in the number of backyard and small-scale pigkeepers. There are no figures for this, and if there were they would be insignificant; but the shift in attitudes towards pigs, influenced by the campaigns of celebrity chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the TV pigman Jimmy Doherty, is gathering pace. No cottage pig-keeper has any problem finding buyers for non-industrial pork or home cured bacon.
Many of these small-scale producers will be giving whatever food waste they have to their pigs, because that is what pigs are for. Often this is a minimal quantity, compared to a pig’s voracious appetite: the amount of food wasted by a normal family is nowhere near enough to fatten a hog.

This type of poultry farming
is a world away from the days of my childhood in the 1970s, when I
remember the chickens and hens running around my uncle’s farmyard;
‘as free as a bird’, you could say. The saying is far from the truth for the
battery-farmed chicken of today. Awareness of these farming methods
has heightened among conscientious consumers and many are now
demanding free-range farming techniques. Television stars such as
Pamela Anderson and UK TV chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and
Jamie Oliver have also raised awareness of the issue of factory farming
through high profile campaigns.
Tyson, the world’s largest meat producer, proudly boasts that
improved animal diet, selective breeding, production technologies,
equipment development and better management practices have enabled the industry to speed up meat production (Tyson Foods Inc.,
2005–6). ‘A 3.5 to 4.5 pound chicken can now be produced in six
to seven weeks compared with 16 weeks in 1935,’ Tyson claims.

Switch on Britain s Dream Homes or I Own Britain s Best Home and watch Melissa Porter and Rhodri Owen saunter
round rural Britain ogling country mansions; watch grand properties being restored in Country House Rescue; zap over to A Place in the Sun and let Amanda Lamb give you a guided tour of wealthy Britons fleeing to buy up in Greece or Crete. Indeed, property programmes like Relocation, Relocation and Property Ladder are two-a-penny. Above all, posh is mostly certainly in. Watch Old Etonian chef Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall rustle up an organic treat; be dazzled by the public-school charm of other TV chefs like Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers; then enjoy the aristocratic Kirstie Allsopp encouraging you to gaze starry-eyed at unaffordable homes.
Too much of our television consists of promotional spiel for the lifestyles, desires and exclusive opportunities of the rich and powerful. It is all part of the redefining of aspiration, persuading us that life is about getting up that ladder, buying a bigger house and car and living it up in some private tropical paradise.

I’ve watched this series multiple times. If you’ve ever fantasized about saying “Fuck it,” quitting your job, and going back to the land, buy this as a present for yourself. If you’ve ever dreamed of getting out of the city and moving to Montana or God-knows-where rural Utopia, procuring your own food and so on, then this is your Scooby snack. It’s endearingly retro, like a warm quilt from Mom, and host/chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall will make you want to grow tomatoes, even if you hate tomatoes. And catch eels, too. Don’t forget the eels.
Into the Darkness
* * *
Sleep Master sleep mask and Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty (ear plugs): The Sleep Master sleep mask—great product, terrible name. I’ve tried dozens of sleep masks, and this is my favorite. It was introduced to me by Jeffrey Zurofsky, who was an integral piece of The 4-Hour Chef, where he appeared as “JZ.”